On the last day of the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami Beach, comedian Donnell Rawlings starts his routine by noting there are a lot of white people in the audience and then asks if we were involved in storming the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. He’s just warming up. “I’m at a Bitcoin convention, and I don’t even know what the fuck a Bitcoin is,” Rawlings says. “I don’t know nothing about crypto, but I know some of the bangingest parties I’ve been to is some crypto parties.”
He goes on: “I know I’m fucked because they paid me in crypto, and I don’t even know how to cash out.” Crypto has to be popular because he can count the number of people sitting in his set, and he knows “I should not be getting the amount of money I am getting paid tonight.”
Rawlings has said “crypto” a lot, and it’s making the crowd restless. After a few more repetitions of the word “crypto,” several people in the crowd begin yelling “Bitcoin.” Crypto, after all, is the blanket term for all digital, blockchain-based assets. That includes everything from Ethereum, the popular blockchain used for decentralized apps and NFTs, to shitcoins, parlance for all non-Bitcoin tokens.
“Listen, we don’t want no crypto-Bitcoin beef up in here, all right?” Rawlings says. The crowd laughs. But I keep thinking about this after the conference is over. To mainstream Bitcoin, the libertarian and anti-state politics associated with it may get shaved off — much as Eternal September changed the culture of the web itself.
Welcome to Bitcoin 2022. Cryptocurrency is the most mainstream it’s ever been, but somehow at this conference, the tone is primarily aggrieved.
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